Welcome to the Infant & Child Learning Lab at UMBC!
Learning one’s native language is a phenomenal achievement. At such a young age, how do children master a system that is so complicated and sophisticated long before they can tie their shoelaces or ride a bicycle? The ICL Lab explores early cognitive and language development with a focus on bilingualism and cross-cultural variation in early learning. We work with infants and children from birth, to early childhood in laboratory, community, and international contexts.
How do babies begin the process of language learning? What happens in the mind of an infant to enable the first words, phrases and sentences that babies begin to produce? How do children acquire two languages? What are the consequences of bilingualism for cognitive and language development? These are just some of the questions that drive our research.
Current Studies
Infant Word Learning
How does the relationship between curiosity and language development change based on different contexts? The purpose of the study is to broadly examine social diversity and cultural language for infant attention. We look to see how participants orient towards novel and familiar visual displays in response to the sounds over a Zoom meeting. This study is currently recruiting; please sign up via our interest form if you’d like to participate!
Cultural Variation in Infant Language
What are the first 10 words your child spoke? The goal of this project is to chart the first ten words children produce and the typical age of acquisition for each word across diverse cultural and linguistic communities from 6 different continents. This project ties directly to prior evidence that early vocabularies vary in composition across languages and contexts and that interactional ecologies differ in how much child-directed speech children receive (Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012).